Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat New Zealand as a Solution Architect for all things Linux, Virtual and of course Cloud. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

Samsung have said sometime in 2Q for the SGS2 ICS firmware, there are developer versions of the ICS firmware floating around now and they're _reasonably_ stable. Who knows when/if the local telco's will release their own version of it though.

There's little benefit to versions of Gingerbread newer than v2.3.3 at any rate, it mostly applies to functionality not present in the SGS2 or in NZ - here's the main updates other than the usual bugfixes as they apply to the SGS2:

There are several versions of ICS firmware's available, as well as beta versions of CyanogenMod 9 which is ICS based. Obviously, none of these are legitimate upgrades and Kies won't find them, from Telecoms perspective they might void your warranty if you were to flash them if you're worried about such things.

FWIW - Don't touch the current releases of ICS. It still has some fairly serious issues, but it's getting there.

There's much more benefit to be had from using a decent replacement kernel such as Siyah and overclocking it while you're at it, but again, you may be voiding your warranty.

stevenz: There are several versions of ICS firmware's available, as well as beta versions of CyanogenMod 9 which is ICS based. Obviously, none of these are legitimate upgrades and Kies won't find them, from Telecoms perspective they might void your warranty if you were to flash them if you're worried about such things.

FWIW - Don't touch the current releases of ICS. It still has some fairly serious issues, but it's getting there.

There's much more benefit to be had from using a decent replacement kernel such as Siyah and overclocking it while you're at it, but again, you may be voiding your warranty.

I would say from telecoms perspective they *will* void the warranty :) so far the ICS build I am running on the I9000 is perfectly stable and has great battery life.

ScottStevensNZ: I would say from telecoms perspective they *will* void the warranty :) so far the ICS build I am running on the I9000 is perfectly stable and has great battery life.

Sounds like the i9000 build is better than the i9100 one then - I had shall we say, "mixed" results :)

So far the only issues I've had are certain apps currently don't work on ICS (Like Viber, and parts of tweetdeck)

Tweetdeck has basically been abandoned, look on the market for Tweakdeck, Paul O'Brian from MoDaCo has modified it to work properly with ICS and also fixed some connectivity issues with it. Other than that it's the same program.